Art & Culture Reviews

As the first bi-lingual edition of a selected works of the Salvadoran poet, Roque Dalton, is published, Roger Atwood reflects on the life and work of one of Central America's greatest literary figures and revolutionaries.

Ricardo Cinalli (born on April 3rd 1948) is a renowned Argentine artist, known for a neo-Classical approach to his painting. Focusing largely on the human figure he has created a style of his own with remarkable drawing skills. His works, in oils crayons painting and famously his impressive frescoes, are featured in major public and private collections around the world and his elegant exhibition “ A Ravishing Muse – An Irreverent Homage to Picasso” runs till November 5th 2016.

The Sundance World Cinema Documentary special jury prize-winner, this tense and immersive tour de force, takes audiences directly into the line of fire between powerful, opposing Peruvian factions who will stop at nothing to keep their respective goals intact.

Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar has caused controversy in the past with his project titled A Logo For America which originally appeared on a billboard in Times Square in the 1980s, and now it has appeared in London where it was emblazoned across the screens of Piccadilly Circus. Jaar’s work declares the words ‘This Is Not America’ across an outline of the United States and is the antithesis to Piccadilly Circus’s ad-laden billboards (frequently from companies born across the pond). It was in the Eighties and remains today a call-to-action to reclaim the term ‘America’ for the entire continent in all its diversity and vastness, an outcry against the fact that the USA claims the term for itself alone. This is a contentious issue that often outrages Latinos, with good reason – it is one of the most obvious symptoms of the USA’s latent ethnocentrism and dismissal of its southern neighbours.

Depicting the slippery nature of the past and the unreliability of memory, Juan Gabriel Vasquez' fifth novel draws a convincing portrait of the complex world of Bogotá in recent years, adding to his own reputation as one of Latin America’s most outstanding authors.

Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente/Embrace of the Serpent takes you on a journey into the deep Colombian Amazon, in principle with two white explorers who are in search for the sacred, psychedelic yakruna plant. Though inspired by the journals written by real-life explorers Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes, Guerra’s approach to the story of the ‘encounter’ is less one of white explorers or adventurers than that of the native Americans, whose voices we rarely hear.